`We Die of Words'

While talking not about his histories of Soviet crime but his poetry, Robert Conquest tells an interviewer that “even though you feel something very strongly, that doesn’t mean you can write about it. I mean you can try, but it often doesn’t come off. And I think there are quite a few bits that I should have cut from my own work. Maybe three-quarters of it.” The interviewer asks why and Conquest replies: “Well, for not getting it right. It’s very difficult to specify why something seems to have failed. I don’t believe in any preconceived method of judging poetry really. Just put it in a drawer for ten years, and then see if it still works.” [Fourteen on Form: Conversations with Poets, ed. William Baer, University Press of Mississippi, 2009.] 

If only more writers would resort to the drawer. Self-ruthlessness is always admirable in a writer. Last weekend, before he consumed half a day taking the SAT, I told my twelve-year-old: “Writing is rewriting.” Politely, he said nothing, but I believe it more strongly than ever. Spontaneity is approximately the opposite of solid, logical, reasonably honest prose and poetry. I thought of the lines from Conquest’s “George Orwell” (Arias from a Love Opera, 1969): 

“We die of words. For touchstones he restored

The real person, real event or thing.” 

Elsewhere, Conquest praises Orwell for his “principle of real, rather than ideological, honesty,” and says “Orwell represented honesty more than anything else. That doesn’t mean that he doesn't sometimes make some rather foolish remarks, or that people, whatever their principles are, don’t lapse sometimes.” As I’m reading Orwell’s essays again, I note the lack of flash, his dedication to the plain style, to not letting fancy prose get in the way of the “real person, real event or thing.” At a book fair in downtown Cleveland in 1969 I bought the recently published four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. I had already read Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in school and disliked them intensely (static and idea-driven, like the science fiction I had renounced a few years earlier), but the non-fiction attracted me. Mr. Sammler’s Planet, serialized in The Atlantic Monthly in November-December 1969, cinched it. When Bellow’s Mr. Sammler gives a talk at Columbia University and cites Orwell approvingly, a bearded heckler in the audience shouts: “Orwell was a fink. He was a sick counterrevolutionary. It’s good he died when he did.” I love Orwell’s line from “Why I Write” (which also includes, as Conquest says, “some rather foolish remarks”): 

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”